Word: conscious
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
PORTNOY'S priest, if not his god, is Dr. Spielvogel. Portnoy himself blunders about, half conscious of the Oedipal and castration complexes that rule his life. In fact, self-consciousness becomes his hang-up. At one point he pauses over a particular problem to ask, "now, why is that? is there an essay somewhere I can read on that? is it of import? or shall I go on?" Portnoy, with his daydreams and his failures, is actually much closer to that other Joycean hero, Leopold Bloom. The more Portnoy dredges up his past, the more it cripples him. He never...
...lying on the couch. He is recreating the past from a specific, highly-emotional point in the present. Emotion recollected in tranquillity turns into hysteria. Each time Portnoy's mother Sophie reappears, another bit of horror is added. Portnoy justifies it all by saying she wears "the old self-conscious on her sleeve!" In any case, she soon seemed to me more like the witch out of Disney's Snow White than anyone else (which only serves to show where my first conscious remembrance of fear lies.) Along the way, there is lots of exaggeration, a veritable thesaurus of recrimination...
...pure white egrets perch high in some palm trees on an island in the marsh. Then we rode down a twisting, red clay road to the Bulow Sugar Mill Plantation ruins. Once there, we got out, and I jumped around for a while. Gayle followed, but she was always conscious of the fact that she was getting wet. I got my camera from the car and tried to get her to pretend the place was alive again, to yell and scream because no one else was there. But she felt uncomfortable pretending, and she couldn't be free when...
...worse than most unions-and possibly they work a lot better. Older men, for example, are no longer obsessed by their careers, and are much less likely to become obsessed with other young women. They are more indulgent; and besides, with them a woman is much less conscious of her own aging. Above all, the old and young partners are generally apt to consider their marriages more thoroughly beforehand than coevals might...
...instruction, that it is all the same. If there were a competing partisan press in this country, with contending points of view, then the public would not mistrust the press (certain elements, yes), but the press would not exist as a whole institution. Broder is also very conscious of causing dissension and division within his "lodge" by talking too much about the press. He does, not name names of journalists who "misuse" their power, and his restraint is evident throughout the piece, the same kind of restraint that is found in his political writing. Broder is tied down...